HomeTips: There’s a Lot to Like

Google announced the winner of the Adsense Story Contest today: Hometips. This is a site that features free content concerning home improvement, remodeling, repair, redecorating, and do-it-yourself projects. For example, here are tips for hanging Christmas lights.

According to the owner, Don Vandervort, the revenues generated by Google Adsense went from paying for coffee to paying for lunches to paying for all salaries, overhead, and business development. The site’s traffic is moderate–something like one million visitors a month or less if you believe Compete. I love this kind of story:

The company started in a backyard clubhouse. Don converted the bottom floor of his sons’ two-story treehouse. “Two-story” treehouse? How cool is that?

The site has a clear focus: content for homeowners. There’s nothing that I can find that smacks of “Web 2.0 social media” at all. This is just so refreshing: All you can do is find information, you don’t need to bond with any strangers.

Don added Adsense to his site by himself. He said it took twenty minutes. He probably didn’t do any market research, focus groups, or 2×2 McKinsey-esque matrix analysis.

He probably didn’t even raise a dime of venture capital. He probably didn’t even try to raise venture capital. He probably didn’t even boot PowerPoint. He certainly didn’t present at Demo or TechCrunch40.

Yes sir, there’s a lot to like about Don’s story: do what you love, focus on a niche, find a viable business model, and work for yourself.

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Guy Kawasaki is the chief evangelist of Canva, an online graphic design tool. Formerly, he was an advisor to the Motorola business unit of Google and chief evangelist of Apple. He is also the author of The Art of Social Media, The Art of the Start, APE: Author, Publisher, Entrepreneur, Enchantment, and nine other books. Kawasaki has a BA from Stanford University and an MBA from UCLA as well as an honorary doctorate from Babson College.

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14 Comments

Funny you should say that about VC. We’ve been talking a lot about that at our company, which is also VC free.
We had a new product we were looking at and did a pretty careful analysis of the pro/con of venture money (we’ve both been through several rounds of that) and decided that it did not make sense for us.
In fact, our conclusion was that it was hard to imagine many pieces of software where you’d really need it at all anymore.
Funny old world.
-OT

Hi Guy, I totally agree, this is a fantastic story and well deserved success for him. VC, TechCrunch etc are all tools to help fuel growth through debt management… if you don’t have the debts accumulating faster then you can pay them off, then there is no need for a VC, Angel Investor or even IPO 😉
Jon

My story is about Google Adwords…not Adsense. But I can share a similar sense of satisfaction.
A partner and I started a product development and factory sourcing business about a year ago. We’re bootstrapping the old fashioned way. Developing sales leads from scratch over the last year was laborious and delivered marginal results. Then, one day, a friend suggested I try Google Adwords. I’m tech savvy, but for some reason had neglected to try this simple tool. Very soon, I was receiving 3-5 sales leads a day from clients looking for consumer product development and offshore manufacturing services. After a few months of using Adwords, we’re currently working with some prospective clients (who found us through Adwords), that could turn us into a company that does millions of dollars in revenue a year. So simple… Hats off to Google and my friend.

For those of you who don’t know Google AdSense:is an ad serving program run by Google. Website owners can enroll in this program to enable text, image and, more recently, video advertisements on their sites. These ads are administered by Google and gen…

Nice to see people making adsense work. I have been using adsense for about 6 months now, and not a single click at either www.draw2mind.com or my other sites. I keep telling myself there must be something wrong – could it be I just don’t have any traffic 😉
So far the only money I have been able to make is by parking websites such as www.inventacar.com. Yet, 49 cents over 3 months is not going to make front page news either. My first financial web goal has been and still remains to earn my first $1 by the end of 2007 – still 14 cents shy. Thanks for sharing the success story.

Guy Kawasaki has a nice example of a successful startup in Home Tips: Theres a Lot to Like. Its a do-it-yourself company, bootstrapped from a start in a backyard clubhouse, one entrepreneur making good decisions and moving forward….

I’ve made money from AdSense. There are some keys:
1. Traffic. If no one looks at your site, you won’t get any clicks. Period.
2. Keywords. Your site has to use keywords that match with ads companies will pay for. I run a celebrity site, where clicks pay about $0.05 a click and a financial site where clicks pay about $0.50 a click. It’s pretty easy to see where I focus my energy.
3. Search. Sites where people are searching for answers seems to help. The home site Guy mentioned probably has visitors that are looking to solve a problem or get information about homes. Visitors will likely click on an ad that might provide a solution.